I talked myself into a corner with someone important, and need to find out
more precisely what adding EnablePlainTextPassword to the one's registry
does to password encryption. Searching with AltaVista and querying the
TechNet did not give me the answer I need, although the former took me to
someone else's experience dealing with MS on this, and according to that
guy, MS ain't talking.

Does EnablePlainTextPassword turn off encryption for passwords entirely, or
just allow it for SAMBA and the like? TechNet had the following ambiguous
statement. Does this mean that NT SP3 tries to use encrypted passwords,
then, if that fails with "System error 1240", tries unencrypted? Or are they
all now plain text?

SYMPTOMS
========

After upgrading your Windows NT 4.0 computer to Service Pack 3 (SP3), you
are unable to connect to certain non-Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB)
servers and you may receive the following error message:

   System error 1240 has occurred.

   The account is not authorized to login from this station.

CAUSE
=====

Some non-Microsoft SMB servers only support unencrypted (plain text)
password exchanges during authentication.

The SMB client redirector in Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3 and later
handles unencrypted passwords differently than previous versions of Windows
NT. Beginning with Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 3, the SMB redirector does
not send an unencrypted password during authentication to an SMB server
unless you add a specific registry entry.

In previous versions, the client would automatically negotiate downward to
unencrypted (plain text) authentication if requested from the server.